Archive for the ‘Mining Hardware’ Category

Yesterday we have reported about a solution for volt modding and overclocking even higher the 5-chip Gridseed ASIC miners for use with the cgminer software modified to support Gridseed ASICs. We have tested the voltage modification on our older and newer revision ASIC miners, and t has allowed us to go from 850 to 950 MHz overclock on the newer miner. Unfortunately it was not working on the older ASIC miner and it was not working with other software miners such as bfgminer or cpuminer for Gridseed. Meanwhile there is an update that solves both of these issues we’ve experienced with the earlier solution. In fact you only need to solder a bridge between another two points on the ASIC miner – note the second green strip on the right from the firs one from yesterday where you need to solder too. This modification will permanently activate the higher voltage and should allow you to overclock all (most likely) Gridseed 5-chip ASICS regardless of their revision and firmware version with all of the available software miners that support them.

The power consumption after applying the permanent voltmod is 10W per 5-chip Gridseec ASIC miner with the fan or about 8W if you remove the fan and use passive cooling (not recommended for voltmoded miners) or use another form of active cooling. Doing the permanently activated voltmod solution we are still able to get best results at 950 MHz with no to very few HW errors and performance of a little over 400 KHS. Pushing for 1000 and 1050 MHz is also possible (going for 1100 MHz or more results in only getting HW errors), but the number of HW errors increases as well, so the actual performance might be lower than running the miner at lower frequency such as 950 MHz with less HW errors. As always do try on your own hardware as there is a variance and you might be able to get better results with your miners. If you do plan to do the hardware voltage modification be aware that there is a risk of damaging the ASIC, especially if you are not good with the soldering iron, so proceed with caution.

The company Bitmain Technologies has announced that the production of the successor of their 180 GHs AntMiner S1 Bitcoin ASIC (on the photo above) is underway and they are going to be shipping the 1 Terahash AntMiner S2 starting in April (next month). The Bitmain has become known for their fast shipping and very competitive prices that go down with the difficulty increase and they are yet again showing how to do business with BTC ASICs. The new S2 units are based on the company’s 55nm BM1380 chips that are used in the S1 miners, but apparently they have managed to achieve high-density chip chains and lower power usage in order to be able to squeeze 1 Terahash in a 4U case along with a 1000W PSU manufactured by Enermax.

The pre-orders for the first batch of the new Bitmain AntMiner S2 1 THS ASIC miners have been filled with a price of $3899 USD (6.34 BTC) and a shipping date of April 1st (not a joke hopefully), the second bach of devices is scheduled for April 10th shipping and the price is a bit low at $3599 USD (5.852 BTC) and there are still units available. The new S2 miners do come a bit more expensive than 5x AntMiner S1 miners overclocked to 200 GHs each to give you a total of 1000 GHS with a price of less than 5 BTC. The difference however is that the power consumption for the S2 miner is 1000W and for the same hashrate with S1 miners you would get roughly about 2100-2100W. So with S1 you get cheaper price for the hardware (you will need to also buy 5x 500W+ PSUs for the miners), but more than double the power consumption for the same hashrate, even though the same chips are used in both products. Putting more BM1380 chips running at lower voltage and frequency is what BitMain has done in order to lower the power usage and get better performance per watt without having to increase the cost of the hardware too much.

The motherboard maker Biostar is apparently going to be launching soon a dedicated crypto mining motherboard or as the call it a “Professional Bitcoin Mining Machine”. The product called Biostar BTC-24GH will use 64 ASIC chips on a single board that supposedly will provide 24 GH/s hashrate for mining Bitcoins (SHA-256). There is no word about release date or pricing available, but this offer already seems like a too little, too late thing with other ASIC makers going for the Terahash range already and the newtwork difficulty already way too high for just 24 GH/s to be profitable, unless it is very power efficient and very cheap, both of which do not seem very likely and you’ll now in a moment why.

The specifications of the 24 GH/s SHA-256 ASIC device say 130W as power consumption per module and you can stack up modules, up to 50 together for higher hashrate. Each module will be with dimensions of 244×244 millimeters and use COM to USB connection to the computer. With 50 of these boards you could get up to 1.2 TH/s hashrate which does not sound bad at all, if the price is right, however you would need 6500W of power so in terms of performance per watt the Biostar BTC-24GH won’t be interesting at all. As we’ve already said: too little, too late .

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